Valiance
by xlostalongtheway
Summary: "Once upon a time, there was a girl. A girl who burned like the sun and danced with the stars. This girl was born on the aftershocks of the last great Time War, and her name was Rose Tyler." Rose Tyler's story, from beginning to end. Prequel to "Look After You". Rose/Doctor.


**Summary: **"Once upon a time, there was a girl. A girl who burned like the sun and danced with the stars. This girl was born on the aftershocks of the last great Time War, and her name was Rose Tyler." Rose Tyler's story, from beginning to end. Prequel to "Look After You". Rose/Doctor.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Doctor Who. Sorry.

* * *

**_Valiance_**

_Every now and then, the stars align; boy and girl meet by the great design. Could it be that you and me are the lucky ones? _[_Lucky Ones_, Lana Del Rey]

* * *

_Once upon a time, there was a girl. A girl who burned like the sun and danced with the stars. A girl who could jump dimensions and howl with the wind if she so desired. A girl who could bend the whole of Time and Space. A girl who had the ability to breathe life into the universe with a single sigh._

_Now, in all honesty, for the first nineteen years of her life, this girl was truly unremarkable. Average. Nothing extraordinary, no strange signs heralding her bright and shining future (at least, none anyone really noticed; humans had a strange way of ignoring what was right in front of them) but that was before she met the Doctor._

_A man who could change his face. A man who invited her to come with him, to run across the stars with her hand in his. And the girl took the invitation. She took his hand and ran, and never looked back._

_This girl was born on the aftershocks of the last great Time War, and her name was Rose Tyler._

* * *

She'd never truly thought it through.

Then again, when do humans ever?

The TARDIS had tried to warn her—had hummed and _tsked _and sent mental negatives to the little blonde human running across her console room, pressing buttons she had no business pressing and yelling _Take me back _as if the TARDIS had any say in any of this. She didn't.

But the human hadn't paid attention, hadn't _understood_, like those silly little apes _never _understand. If anything, she'd only worked harder, her desperation growing. And when they landed in London, 2006, the TARDIS breathed a little sigh of relief. Her Thief was gone, and the absence she felt hurt, it truly did, but his little human was safe. She felt the girl walk away, dismayed and brokenhearted. Safe. Safe. The Old Girl kept repeating that to herself, as if it would make it any better.

The girl was safe and that's what counted. It's what her Thief would have wanted.

But then she'd come back. Oh, the little shop girl from twenty-first century London had come back and done what no being—human, Time Lord, or other—would have ever dared to do. She tried to open the TARDIS's heart. And the Old Girl had fought, no doubt about that. She'd thrashed and lurched and heaved and shut herself up tight.

But then she'd seen it—the tears, heard the girl's hurried whisper of _please please please take me back to him_ and the TARDIS knew. This was no ordinary human. Of course, she'd known _that _the second the blonde had stepped through her doors. The TARDIS couldn't _see _her, for starters. The Old Girl had always been all-seeing, transcendental and sentient, but she couldn't _see _anything involving the little blonde shop girl.

That had been warning sign number one. But instead of being frightened or wary of her Thief's new companion, the girl had only brought ease and comfort to the timeship. She had lit up the dark corners of her Time Lord's hearts, had done what the TARDIS would have otherwise thought impossible.

She was devoted to him in a way that comforted the TARDIS to no end. This was a human, a mysterious little pink-and-yellow human who would gladly give herself up for his safety, who was fueled by her light and loyalty, by her desperation to get back to the man she loved.

_Love._

It had always been such a strange concept to the TARDIS. She was an ancient, sentient, transcendental, multidimensional timeship from a planet that existed only in memory and fairytales, now, but she had never truly understood the concept of _love_ until she looked into Rose Tyler's eyes.

The TARDIS made a choice that day. A choice that had opened the floodgates to what would potentially be a bright, happy future for her Thief, or a dark, dismal one for her Wolf.

She willed for the former, and allowed the human to take her heart.

* * *

_Rose knew, that in thirty minutes, if you asked her what had happened while she was Bad Wolf, she wouldn't know._

_But as of now, she knew _everything_._

_Sometime in between grinding the Emperor of the Daleks into dust and _I bring life_, she'd seen it. The day she was born, the day she would die. A mad, wonderful child named Amelia Pond, Amy Pond, Amelia Williams, a girl who would save her. Save him. Save them. She saw a life that wasn't hers, of a golden wolf born out of starlight, breathing life into the universe. A myth a million billion trillion years old._

_She saw it all, and she wept for it all. Because somewhere beyond the declarations of gods and goddesses, of false prophecies and the whispers of weeping angels, she saw the fall of civilizations, planets tumbling into ruin, entire species swept off the grid over the course of creation. And she wept for them._

_She was only human, after all._

_Just a girl, holding a goddess, created by a wolf, cradled by the TARDIS._

_But still, human._

_Only ever human._

* * *

The first time they entered the parallel universe, Rose felt it. A tug, a pull, something in the back of her head and coating her heartstrings—the TARDIS, she thought.

She'd developed a sort of… bond, with the TARDIS, after the Gamestation. A strange, wonderful bond, one Rose didn't completely understand. It had started off small, at first—a strange kinship that had the Old Girl leaving outfits out for Rose or even—during some strange circumstances neither of them ever told the Doctor about—translating Gallifreyan for the tenacious blonde. It also had Rose chastising the Doctor for hitting the TARDIS console with that god-awful mallet or patting the doors and whispering words of thanks.

Little things, things that had grown on Rose. And when the TARDIS had gone dark, when the Doctor had whispered the word "dead", Rose felt her heart clench, her entire world threaten to drop out from under her. The TARDIS. She was dead.

And as far as Rose was concerned, a piece of her had died with it.

* * *

_She felt the moment the Doctor breathed life into his magical machine._

_Sitting on that bench in parallel London, she'd felt it, and breathed a small sigh of relief. She didn't know what had happened, but she'd felt infinitely better, as if a weight had lifted off her shoulders. She heard the hum in her head, however faint, and relaxed._

_Not home, not just yet. But she was close._

_Rose didn't know what the bond with the TARDIS meant—why she felt so uncomfortable whenever she strayed too far from the Old Girl, or why she couldn't get to sleep whenever she and the Doctor spent the night as someone's guests or at her mum's flat or something._

_She didn't know, but as long as she had that glorious, golden song in the back of her head, she didn't care._

* * *

Six months later, in that same parallel universe, a twenty-two-year-old girl stood in the lever room of an abandoned Torchwood Tower, banging her hands against the wall and wailing, crying, sobbing for the two things she'd loved.

The two things she'd lost.

The man and his blue box. The Time Lord and his timeship. The Doctor and his TARDIS. She wouldn't see his goofy smile, hear his ridiculous gob or feel his hand in hers. Never again, not anymore. She couldn't get lost in the bowels of that beloved blue box, couldn't have secretive—if somewhat vague—telepathic girl-talks with the walls of a time machine, couldn't lose herself in the wardrobe room for hours on end.

She couldn't go back.

* * *

_After Canary Wharf, the TARDIS's song had turned from its usual contented hum to a loud, keening wail, similar to a person in mourning._

_The Doctor didn't pay attention—or rather, he didn't _want_ to pay attention, as he searched the universe for another rip, another tear, just one last crack in the fabric of reality, as he went into orbit around a supernova, as he ran out of time, choking out those three simple words in the emptiness of his bigger-on-the-inside timeship._

_The TARDIS remained singing that mourning song, crying for her wolf, her sister, her corporeal half. The half that could breathe and walk and talk and love and listen and _dance_—oh, that was something they liked, right? The Wolf and the Thief and the Box—they liked dancing, even if only two of them could do it. Now there would be no dancing._

_Not with Martha, not with Donna, not with _anyone_, ever again. Not with Her Thief, and definitely _not _within Her walls._

_It wasn't their place. It wasn't their _right_. Only one person had ever had that right._

_And she was gone._

* * *

Five years, five months, two weeks, and six days after Canary Wharf, the world burst from gray to gold in a matter of moments.

It happened on an abandoned street in 2008 on a misplaced Earth, when one pink-and-yellow human found her way home. A song, one of happiness and desperate relief rang in the heads of a blonde girl and a pinstriped Time Lord, urging them both forward, forward, sprinting across littered streets and towards one another.

A song that was interrupted by one, haunting word.

_Exterminate!_

* * *

_The TARDIS could feel the moment she entered the parallel world, and she knew what had to happen._

_And Her Wolf—oh, Her Wolf knew, too. She'd always known, even if she didn't quite remember. She'd seen this ending before, being left on a beach in a parallel world with a face and mind-copy of her pinstriped pilot._

_Oh, she would be sad, and the TARDIS would be sad, too. There would be no songs for a long, long time—even longer on Rose Tyler's part. But they would make it through, and they would wait, like they always would._

_Like they always had._

* * *

Rose wasn't complaining about the life the Doctor had given her. Far from it. She cherished it.

Granted, she was a bit iffy with _both _of them at first, for tricking her, for not asking her what _she _really wanted—but she didn't regret the metacrisis Doctor. She didn't regret staying behind for him, giving him a chance.

Of course she missed the other him. The alien him, the two-hearted him. She worried about him, too. Running around the universe all by himself (because Donna's already gone, the metacrisis explained to her as much).

She missed him and she worried for him and there were times where she just wanted to _be there_, but she sucked it up and allowed herself to have this other version of her greatest fantasy, because it was what she had. A one hearted-Doctor who could actually choke out the words _I love you_. The opportunity to have children and get married and spend forever with the man she loved.

It was his final gift to her. His final gift to himself.

* * *

_They lived a good life._

_They got married, skirted around the option of having kids for a while, until eight negative pregnancy tests and four specialists told them it just wouldn't be possible. They cried, and later, they laughed. They worked at Torchwood, him as a consultant, her as one of the best field agents around. It was not the textbook definition of perfect, but it was their definition. And that was enough._

_Enough, until Rose's thirty-fifth birthday._

_Until one of her mum's rich society friends made some offhand comment about her "granddaughter"._

_Until John began noticing his accumulating grey hairs and the deepening laugh lines around his mouth._

_Until they realized she wasn't aging._

* * *

Years passed—scary, terrifying years that had Rose Tyler looking on as her world grew older through never-changing eyes. It had her looking on as her parents withered and died, as her baby brother grew older and people began mistaking _her _for being the younger sibling, as her husband got older and older and she stayed the same, as she'd always been.

It saw them scrambling to find answers. It saw them reeling, weeping and screaming at the undeniable truth.

_Bad Wolf._

The Doctor had once said that she could never spend his forever with him.

Well, he'd been wrong. She could. But now it was too late, and she was forced to do the one thing he hadn't wanted to do, much less make _her _do.

Watch the person you love decay and wither and die.

* * *

_The Doctor—the human Doctor—died at age one-hundred and four._

_Not bad, Rose will think later, when the pain mostly wears off and all she feels is numb. She threw herself into Torchwood after that—her brother was dead, her husband was dead, her parents and all her friends were dead. Now, she was just an anomaly in her own company. She was the woman everyone feared, the woman everyone hated, the woman everyone loved._

_She had nothing to lose and nothing to gain, nothing to protect, nothing to live or die for, nothing to strive for._

_Until one day, she did._

* * *

It all began with a crack in a little boy's bedroom.

If it had happened to any other child, the crack probably would've gone unnoticed, untouched. Because what do humans do, when they see something they don't understand? They get angry and they ignore it. They pretend it doesn't exist, because they can't explain it, can't _fathom _it. So they turn their backs and hope it goes away.

But this crack didn't go away. It wouldn't. Which was good, because the owner of the bedroom in which it had appeared was a little boy by the name of Rory Williams. Rory was like every other ten-year-old boy his age. He was normal, some would say unremarkable. Average grades, good boy, raised in an alright neighborhood with a single, doting dad.

A dad that worked for Torchwood.

A dad that had called his boss _immediately _after seeing the crack, after _hearing _it. There was something about it that made both of the Williams boys uneasy, and the voices emanating from inside just made it all the more strange. So he'd called his coworkers, who'd eventually notified his supervisor, who'd finally contacted his boss.

And _that _was how Rose Tyler, CEO of Torchwood One in London on planet Earth in Pete's World, found herself perched on the edge of a blue bed, scanning the strange crack in Rory's wall with her sonic pen. She frowned at the results.

"The crack isn't a crack," she murmured, running a tentative finger over the imperfection, "It's not _just _a crack, anyway. An' certainly not just in your wall. It's two points in time that never should've touched." All those years of having the Doctor and John explain temporal mechanics to her, and she was only just now finally putting it to use. Ten years after John's death, nearly eighty since she'd last seen the troublemaking full-Time Lord.

She shook herself out of her thoughts when Rory's father asked, "Can you fix it?" He sounded worried, and he should be. And not just for Rory's safety, but his as well.

But Rose didn't tell them that. She shrugged and took out her pen, pressing the button.

"I can try," she said.

* * *

_She pressed the button and closed the crack._

_But not before getting pulled in._

_Not before erasing herself from Pete's World entirely._

* * *

In those moments between existing and not-existing, she remembered it all. She remembered bright lights and the Gamestation and howling to the sun and the stars and _I want you safe, my Doctor._

Her Doctor.

She recalled seeing something—_someone_—from all of Time and Space, a mad, impossible child, all red hair and wide green eyes and an unfailing optimism that had a broken, lonely old man feeling just a little lighter. A mad, impossible child that had taken her imaginary best friend and her guardian angel and had brought them back together in the aftermath of an entire universe ending and beginning again. A mad, impossible child, crying in her bedroom over parents that, for all intents and purposes, had never been.

_There, _Rose thought, pushing herself towards the girl.

* * *

_She might have been journeying for minutes or months, she didn't know how long until she stopped. And then, all the years and minutes and nanoseconds caught up with her._

Three-hundred-and-eighty-nine years,_ she thought. Nearly five centuries since John and her parents and Jake and Tony, since Bad Wolf Bay; four since Rory Williams and the crack in his wall. The world had passed her by, blurring and converging and coalescing, time twisting and seeming simultaneously shorter and longer while she recreated herself._

_In a way, mere seconds had passed. In another, it had been centuries._

_She could feel it in her bones, see her Timeline for one brief moment, extending in both directions. She'd been a girl who existed only with Gallifrey's destruction. A girl, just _waiting_ for that final aftershock before entering this world._

* * *

She appeared in another bedroom, obviously a child's, obviously a girl's, decidedly _not_ Rory Williams'.

Definitely in her correct universe.

She could feel her—the TARDIS—sweet and singing in the back of her head. Sad and a little lonely, for sure, spiking only when she realized who'd just crossed the Void. She knew what the Old Girl wanted—she wanted to find her again, her Wolf, to bring Time's Champion and the Valiant Child together again.

But she knew better. She'd seen what Rose had.

And she didn't come looking for her.

Not yet.

* * *

_That day had been the start of a chapter Rose would later call _The Girl Who Believed_._

_The Doctor had always affectionately called Amy "The Girl Who Waited", but Rose thought _The Girl Who Believed_ was a much better title. Because, in the end, if it hadn't been for Amy and her inability to grow up, or her defiance to any and every adult figure in her childhood, or her need to cling to guardian angels and imaginary friends, or her outburst at her wedding reception, Rose never would've found her way home._

_Oh, it had been a long time coming—centuries on her part, centuries of crossing dimensions and weaving across timelines as a mere echo, using all those years to pull herself back into being after getting torn apart by that stupid crack in reality. It had been a year for Amy—a year with monsters and beasts and weeping angels._

_It had been hellish to say the least, but Rose liked to think it had worked out in the end._

* * *

The Doctor pulled her into the new, new TARDIS, letting go of her hand long enough to jog up to the console and get them out of the reception and to a better parking space. When he was done, he turned back to face her, eyes wide in what Rose saw was a brilliant mix of worry, shock, and unbridled joy.

"How—" he began, then cut himself off, swallowing the lump that had appeared in his throat, "How did you—"

"Bad Wolf," she said instantly, and he sucked in a sharp breath at the two, familiar words. Rose continued at the question still in his eyes. "She's kept me alive, for so long now. Long enough for me to outlive John—the metacrisis Doctor."

Something in his eyes softened. "Oh, Rose, I—"

"Don't," she said, giving him a tiny smile, "Don't. Let me finish, yeah?" At his nod, she continued. She told him about the centuries left alone, about the crack in the parallel Rory's wall, about getting sucked from existence in that world and getting spit back out in her proper universe. She wasn't sure why, but she was sure some sort of natural balance thing had been the cause of that. She didn't belong in that universe, so when she was erased, she was merely carried across to her correct one.

It probably helped she had Bad Wolf, too.

_I create myself._

When she was done, he'd pulled her into a tight embrace, the two of them leaning up against the console. The TARDIS hummed contentedly in both of their minds, happy. The golden song from their travels in his ninth and tenth bodies was back, loud and triumphant in the back of their heads.

* * *

_And so, the girl with stars in her eyes and wolves howling in her head came home, home to tame her storm. She ran through the stars with Time's Champion and the Boy Who Waited and the Girl Who Believed. She walked the length of a river and saved a melody from ending too soon._

_For a long time, such a very long time, the girl thought her story had ended. She thought the last page of her epilogue had been sitting, timeless, beside her old and withering husband's bedside, as the heart monitors slowed._

_She didn't know that was just the beginning. That at that moment, the stage was still being set for what would eventually be the story of her life. The story of a she-wolf who found and lost a hurricane and the mad little girl who brought them both together again._

* * *

**Sorry for the delay! I can't tell you how long I've been messing with this story. But I'm finally satisfied with it.**

**Also, sorry if it kind of seemed Rose/TARDIS centered in the beginning. But I like the belief that they shared a profound bond post-Satellite Five.**

**Constructive criticism and general reviews are always welcome! Thank you for reading (:**


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